✨did you know✨
#Footdee - or Fittie as it is known by locals - is a small village found at the foot of the River Dee (hence the name), with this quaint #lighthouse marking the corner between the North Sea and the river. #TheRiverDee flows through #Aberdeenshire from the Cairngorms. The area along its banks, which flow for just 87 miles, were a favorite of #QueenVictoria. She liked it so much that she built a freaking castle next to it (tune in later for more on this!). Here in #Fittie, it’s windy AF as you can see from my hair and jacket; the area was inhabited for hundreds of years by hardened #fishermen who I can only assume dealt with the typically shit weather by drinking a lot scotch (more on scotch later, too).

Writing on the website, launched alongside a Twitter account providing extracts from the journals, the Queen said: 'In this the year of my Diamond Jubilee, I am delighted to be able to present, for the first time, the complete online collection of Queen Victoria’s journals from the Royal Archives.
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'These diaries cover the period from Queen Victoria’s childhood days to her accession to the throne, marriage to Prince Albert, and later, her Golden and Diamond Jubilees.
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'Thirteen volumes in Victoria’s own hand survive, and the majority of the remaining volumes were transcribed after Queen Victoria’s death by her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, on her mother’s instructions.
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'Wrote in my journal, which I am vain enough to think may perhaps some day be reduced to interesting memoirs'
'It seems fitting that the subject of the first major public release of material from the Royal Archives is Queen Victoria, who was the first Monarch to celebrate a Diamond Jubilee.'
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The Queen took a particular interest in a drawing of Victoria’s wedding head dress when shown the original pages from the diaries today.
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The launch was timed to coincide with the 193rd anniversary of Victoria’s birth today.
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She would perhaps have been interested in how the documents are now available on the internet - as she wrote, again on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee, of sending a message electronically.
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She wrote: 'I touched an electric button, by which I started a message which was telegraphed throughout the whole Empire.
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'It was the following: "From my heart I thank my beloved people, may God bless them." At this time the sun burst out...'
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She had certainly envisaged them being read by others, writing on January 24 1843: 'Wrote in my journal, which I am vain enough to think may perhaps some day be reduced to interesting memoirs.'
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Over the years, Victoria became a keen diarist, extensively documenting details of both public and private life.
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She underlined important words or phrases two or even three times, and liberally used exclamation marks.
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Continues in the comments 👇🏻

The diary of Queen Victoria, aged 13: 40,000 pages of monarch's journals launched online by great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth.
⠀ 'This book, Mamma gave me, that I might write the journal of my journey to Wales in it.'
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So began the first volume of a journal written in 1832 by Princess Victoria of Kent, aged 13.
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It was a diary that the young royal - later to become Queen and ruler of the British Empire - would continue to add to until her death in 1901.
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And now, her great-great-granddaughter Queen Elizabeth has launched a website documenting Victoria's life in her own words.
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The monarch was handed a remote control in Buckingham Palace’s throne room yesterday, which she pointed at a screen to officially launch the website, www.queenvictoriasjournals.org - but revealed she had no plans to publish her own diaries.
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The site contains 40,000 pages of the surviving volumes of Victoria's journals, along with sketches and paintings she drew to illustrate them.
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The first entry relating to Wales concerned a trip that was planned partly as a holiday, and partly as an opportunity to introduce the young princess to the nation to whose throne she was heiress. She wrote the passage as they travelled through Snowdonia.
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Her mother, the Duchess of Kent, and her Governess, Baroness Lehzen, wanted her to keep the diary to aid her education - that she might write well and observe what she saw.
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The Royal Archives, Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University and online publisher ProQuest scanned the pages - some in Victoria’s own hand and some edited and then transcribed by her daughter Beatrice after her death - for the six-month project, carried out to mark the Diamond Jubilee.
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When asked by Bodleian librarian Sarah Thomas if she herself wrote a diary, the Queen, wearing a summery floral printed dress, replied to laughter from those gathered to mark the launch: 'Mine’s not being published'.
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Dr Thomas said afterwards that she 'couldn’t resist' asking the Queen about her own journals, having been a part of the project.
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She added that it was 'an amazing honour' to work on the journals.
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Continues in the comments:

Pt 2: Both William and Adelaide were fond of their niece, Princess Victoria of Kent, and wanted her to be closer to them. Their efforts were frustrated by Victoria's mother, the Dowager Duchess of Kent, who refused to acknowledge Adelaide's precedence. The King, aggrieved at what he took to be disrespect from the Duchess to his wife, only hoped to have the satisfaction of living beyond Victoria's age of majority, so that the Duchess of Kent would never be Regent.
By June 1837, it became evident that the King was fatally ill. Adelaide stayed beside William's deathbed devotedly, until his death in the early hours of the morning of 20 June 1837; Victoria was proclaimed as Queen. Adelaide was the first queen dowager in over a century (Charles II's widow, Catherine of Braganza, had died in 1705, and Mary of Modena, wife of the deposed James II, died in 1718), Adelaide survived her husband by twelve years.
She died during the reign of her niece Queen Victoria on 2 December 1849 of natural causes.
Queen Adelaide's name is probably best remembered in the Australian state of South Australia, founded during the brief reign of William IV. The capital city of Adelaide was named after her at its founding in 1836.
Queen Victoria's firstborn child, Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, took her second name from her great-aunt, who was also the child's godmother. #greatbritain#queenofengland#britishroyals#britishroyalty#britishmonarchy#hanover#wiliamiv#adelaideofsaxemeiningen#queenvictoria#royalconsort